A Fanfictioneer's Guide to
by awilla the hun
Summary: My attempts at rectifying a number of issues with fanfictions, with a simple, easy to understand guide. Please add suggestions of your own.
1. Worldbuilding

A fanfictioneer's guide on how to build worlds

**A fanfictioneer's guide on how to build worlds**

Before going any further, let me get it clear that this is largely concerned to the construction of an entirely new country, empire, or other group facing a canon one, but it could also apply to people constructing planets or towns in canon worlds.

Now, welcome to the art of building worlds. You seem to have ambition, which is good- you intend to construct the most convincing, most original, most incredible world ever to hit not just the site, but in all of fan fiction! Perfectly noble desires, all of them. We remember the Lord of the Rings, for Middle Earth as much as anything else, and Warhammer 40,000 for the incredible coolness that is the Imperium. (Which is as big an inspiration for my own world building as anything.) You have ideas for races, cultures, technology, art, buildings and settings beyond anything yet seen on Earth- and why shouldn't you? This is , after all, never really home to gritty urban stories. We all want to see them!

You will note, however, the crucial point missing from my list of perceived ideas as to what you want in your world: that of weaponry. I will be getting to this later, so please humour me.

Anyway, this article has came about mostly because, upon trawling through , I have seen a certain paucity of anything that can be described as effective world building. So, here are my potted instructions as to how to do this.

Be plausible.

At least in the context of general laws of physics, politics and evolution. Having creatures using "Uncurable poisons" does not make any sense in the context of nature. Animals gain immunities to these things. (Ditto in political systems. Dictatorships often do not make for great innovation without lots of money being poured into it, or something else going on, e.g. foreign intervention, or loads of resources being poured into one particular branch.)

(This is one reason why the Imperium has spent ten thousand years slowly stagnating- its ill educated work force cannot innovate. They haven't got the time, when working their heads off in often hostile environments, or indeed the intelligence, after dogma being poured into them about obeying the Emperor above all, and having very little education. This has the advantage of making immensely loyal servants- they probably couldn't have withstood their numerous enemies without it, even with bigger guns- but they are not really changing their methods of war. Indeed, they are often going backwards, e.g. the Baneblades becoming rarer.)

As a result, having a huge, militaristic dictatorship take on the Imperium with all guns blazing and smacking down the finest that the Guard has to offer is not a realistic proposition. (Unless psychic powers are involved, or sheer numbers.)

With regards to politics, remember that most people simply want comfort and security. If they do not have this, and there is another, well known system that offers it with relatively little sacrifice, they flock to it. (Hence the Chaos Gods being popular.) This is when the method of keeping power comes in for the politician: if he has an enormous, loyal army, or a secret police, or is himself personally enormously dangerous, he can keep it. If the author just thinks that the people will let themselves be downtrodden, then the author is utterly wrong; sooner or later, someone will rebel. Especially if it's an enormous multinational confederation, with each race possessed of enormous firepower and its own very distinct national identity. (Look at the Russian Empire, Vex Master.) On the other hand, utopias (especially with small farm worlds- look at Earth! Is it small or vulnerable to raids?-) are equally unlikely. People argue. People have nasty sides. Perfect governments are extremely rare.

Finally, please don't make another master race of psychically controlled mutants who just march in and kill people. Seriously, it's getting dull: especially as the battle scenes are:

Grunt: We'll hold them off, Brother Captain, while you get to the space ship and blow it up with the deus ex machina bomb.

Captain Heroic: Aye. Good luck, Trooper Downtrodden.

Last stand ensues as Thunderhawk takes off. This involved guardsmen pouring bullets into the enemy until their ammo runs out, and then taking them with bayonets until they all die. Then, the last man looks up to see the Space Marine strike force blowing up the mothership. He cheers, watches aliens run around in confusion/self destruct/kill each other. Story ends.

Stick to Canon.

All the factions must act in character, have appropriate arms and technology, and react in character to these newcomers. The Imperium, to use one off used example, is not going to randomly let people walk into the Golden Throne Room and heal the Emperor just because they wave around some shiny medical technology. They would probably shoot the blighters, or burn them at the stake, for merely trying to get into the throne room. (And please, please, please don't have the aliens as part of a great Eldar Prophecy that brings back all the Primachs for one enormous battle at the end. That's just boring.)

This also means that your characters should, as far as possible, be acting towards the laws of canon. They should, for Warhammer 40k, have people being taken over by the chaos gods (they shouldn't just scoff at them as Imperial Superstitions, before getting eaten by Daemons: if they have warp travel or psykers- and they will- they will know of the warp, and they will be vulnerable to it. Their psykers should get their powers from the warp. Their technology shouldn't be infinitely more advanced than everyone else's. And so on. Making them a reasonably powerful country, rather than an all conquering super state, and the story will be much more interesting than watching everyone band together in a totally unrealistic grand alliance to stop them.

Which brings me onto the third point…

**IT IS NOT ALL WAR!!**

Now, I can understand how this state of affairs came about. We have all watched Star Wars, Star Trek, and innumerable other Sci Fi things with war in them. We play our computer games, with the arms of factions being described in exquisite detail (although not necessarily realistic- witness battle tanks almost always having no anti infantry machine guns, for example, or AA units not being able to move their guns down and blast ground troops), and coming to the conclusion that, simply by combining all those flashy RTS units and FPS Guns (and probably dialogue drawn from cut scenes) that we can make a cool world.

WRONG!

To show you what I mean, let me introduce America if it had been designed by some of our fanfictioneers.

Name of Country: USA

Society: Democracy, led by a President. (George Bush, who declared war upon Iraq. A great military leader, former general, war hero.) Next candidates are John McCain (wants to continue war, ergo hero), and Barak Obama (wants to surrender, ergo villain.)

((Note the lack of any other qualities attached to the leader. He has no domestic policy, and very little foreign policy. Now, you may hate him, but you must agree that the real Bush is better than this guy. At least he has a domestic policy, of sorts. And most leaders in these are definitely Republican, if not even further right.))

Army 

US Marine

Weapon: ((I'm not an expert here)) M16 Assault Rifle (500 yard range, 200 rounds per minute, shoots through thin metal.)

Hand Grenade

Colt Handgun

Armour: Flak Vest and "Land Warrior" System. (Contains cameras, communication links, can withstand 5 bursts from an AK 47.)

And so on, with unit after unit, in an enormous list of units and troop types, each with masterly research put into their firearms, and how much bolt shells they can withstand (usually abnormally high figures), and their special combat skills, and their running speed, (but not, oddly enough, their rations, mess kit, and other things that the soldier would probably value just as highly as all this.) And after about ten pages of this, the story begins.

Something is missing here. No, wait, a lot is missing. We have no media. We have no history. No slang. No current topical issues (apart from war.) No culture. Nothing apart from a very sketchy description of a political system, and the types of rifles everyone carries.

This does not make for anything that can be called a convincing world.

Now, don't get me wrong, if you are writing a military based story, the army is important. You need to have a vague idea of how the troops fight. But if you do this, you never have a sense that there is anything behind the guns, and this, I think, is a substantial weakness. The reader does not need precise figures of range, or anything like that. The reader wants a good story, with characters with whom sympathy can be made. And this can be made by having them act in human ways (or, at least, ways appropriate to their race.)

Make them read newspapers. Have them mention some scandal at home, or the names of towns, or slang, or curse gods, or pray to them, or smoke, or mention brands, or mockingly imitate adverts from television, or-

Do things that we do. Even the most autocratic, religious, uptight societies in our history have had these. If your societies do, they are so much more convincing. Having some idea of a home front is vital- after all, the majority of your people are probably not going to be fighting. Many of those who are would have had civilian life, or at least periods of leave.

And it can add to your characters. For example;

Sergeant Becker lowered his copy of the _Releinstgrad Daily_, reflected that they had only got a six month old one this time, and made a comment to his friend that the galaxy was going to the dogs.

"Bloody anti blood sportists are bloody at it again," he grumbled, tugging irritably at his tentacles. "And you know what that'll mean? Less good hunted meat for our rations! And we get papers written at the time of Emperor Grandstrum too!"

Private Rawlinsworth was about to point out that it was unlikely that they were to receive a newspaper from eight thousand years ago, and that the leader of the anti blood sports was, in the Sergeant's words "a nice piece" when the whole trench shook. "Incoming!" he cried instead, and then the whole world shook as the Imperial Guns opened fire. He grabbed his gauss rifle, cursed the damned things clumsy butt, and hurried to the parapet.

Now, isn't that better than having someone grunting generic quotes about girls and religion before going over the top and having all the high tech guns going off? With bland descriptions?

This can equally be applied to worlds with grand prophecies going on: not everything revolves around the quest being accompanied.

If there is any further advice, please add it. I think I'll do crossovers next.


	2. Crossovers

A Fanfictioneer's Guide on How to Write Crossovers

**A Fanfictioneer's Guide on How to Write Crossovers**

The response from the first one was good enough, so here I go again. May I recommend, for those of you who appreciate help on writing in general, the use of Limyaael's Rants on live journal? They can easily be found from the judicious use of google, or any search engine.

So. Crossovers. I doubt that any one of us hasn't, after watching a brace of science fiction movies in quick succession (or, indeed, having just watched two science fiction movies/games/books etc) thought something along the lines of "Hmm. Well, I do believe that it could make a most illuminating and entertaining read if X went to Y!" or words to that effect. So, many people have, and, as per usual, many mistakes have been made. Otherwise, I wouldn't have to write these Guides, would I?

So, these mistakes. There are probably too many to list, but the main ones are:

A Fandom is Overpowered/Underpowered

This is extremely common throughout every form of crossover fic, but especially (or so it seems to me) warhammer ones, where there are inevitably massive armies and fleets involved. This is applied at all levels and, more often than not, in favour of the non warhammer fandom. I have several personal theories about this: the Imperium is a dark and evil dictatorship, so it can't beat the democratic good guys; the Imperium has been technologically devolving for ten thousand years, so it can't beat the democratic good guys (wrong!); the Imperium has religion, so it's technologically crude, and so on.

This is not as such a tirade against all those stinking star wars/40k crossovers which feature the jedi killing all of Warhammer's greatest villains (Abaddon, say) and leaving without a scratch on them (although, Darth Malleus, it does annoy me by god.) What does annoy me, though, is that so much appears to be un researched, and non canonical, and so many other things that make the fanfic simply dull to read. Wouldn't it be better if the story really was a close fight to the end, with canon characters from both sides being killed off left right and centre; with thousands dying, guardsman and stormtrooper alike; with truly exciting duels between (say) a Warhound Titan and an AT-AT walker, all guns blazing, with both sides losing shields and armour, with mere mortals down below gazing up at the great, strobing flashes of laser and plasma. Wouldn't this be better than some of the trite stuff pouring out of our crossover writers?

The solution to this, I'm afraid, is to research. A lot. In War of the Universes (a new chapter is forthcoming, so don't worry!) I spent much of a day looking at the t'au codex, novels, First World War orders of battle (1904 ones were oddly hard to find), technology from both sides, what was happening in 1904, the types of rifles used by the Great Powers of Europe (note that America is not one of them yet), and all those innumerable other things that really put a story into its setting. And notice that it isn't all matters of war; again, there would be far more than differences in tactics that set fandoms apart (although in War of the Universes, part of the fun will probably be in seeing how armies from over a hundred years ago fight against the massively advanced technology and psychic powers of 40,000 years time. It will be a damn sight more pronounced than 40k vs Star Wars, I think. Just a little spoiler, there…) There will be differences in culture, in ways of speech (it is incredible how the English speaking Trekkies speak the same language as the Gothic speaking Imperials, who have innumerable dialects apart from their main one on all their different worlds), and in all those other things. To put it to you in a real world example, to be a Star Trek captain visiting the Imperium would be perhaps akin to an American University student, without any knowledge of local custom (and minimal arms and influence) visiting the Middle East. Such a meeting would not go anything like as smoothly as what happens in most fanfics. Putting the research into practice is just as essential. If necessary, cover your back in enormously comprehensive author's notes displaying every single fact or statistic that you'll need. Anything to avoid the legions of fans who read these things with fine tooth combs (like yours truly, it must be said) to grab any inconsistencies. Because, really, they stand out.

Once the new faction arrives, everything is solved

Virtually every crossover in warhammer that I have ever read features this. The Trekkies, Jedi, Imperial Soldiers, or whatever, go into the Imperium, miraculously get the Emperor and Primachs back on their feet, get the Imperium into a grand alliance (it is often called just that) with all the "nice" alien races (read: the ones with hot Farseers for Kirk to "get going" on, or anime style battlesuits to appease gundam fans), kill Abaddon, the chaos legions, the Dragon on Mars, the Chief Ecclesiarch of the Imperium (who never gets any thanks for maintaining faith in the Emperor, the only thing that's kept Imperial Worlds loyal, and Daemons at bay, for ten thousand years), the oppressive side of the Imperial regime, and Ghazkull Thraka, and, and-

Stop that. No, really, stop it right now.

Simply reducing a galaxy as complex as that of the Warhammer 40,000 Universe is, firstly, a waste of brilliant resources for drama and tension, and secondly plain unrealistic. The Imperium has had no great records of people writing prophecies, even in the Imperial days, and they aren't going to start the moment a lightsabre wielding buffoon in robes steps into the galactic stage. Judging by the way that pilgrims have queued for their entire lifetimes to get a pilgrimage to Terra (and even have been born in the queues), it is extremely unlikely that the Imperium are going to let some guy in PJs, brandishing unconsecrated technology, from a different galaxy that no one's heard of until a few months ago, and who has spent his time mouthing off the Imperial Creed into the Golden Throne Room. (I am looking at _A New Age_ here.)

And don't get me started on all those grand alliances. Yes, the Eldar have been known to form military alliance with the Imperium, and yes, the T'au are not (by 40k standards) overtly hostile. But, on the other hand, both of those races would very much like to see the Imperium utterly devastated- the Eldar have been known to destroy an Imperial world because they have seen that someone on it may kill an elder- or under their control (the T'au have been expanding. Less bloodily than some, but still expanding.) They will not be convinced to ally forever if a robe wearing man walks in, adjusts his long hair, makes room for his green skinned, long eared, backward talking master, and tells them that, actually, the human race is now willing to team up after ten thousand years of hostility. They would probably shoot him on sight. The Imperium would be similarly unlikely to accept this state of affairs. Occasionally, we see a ship captain going on about Xenos Filth, but nothing more. The Imperium just blithely joins in. Now, think about the modern reaction that Christians- far less intolerant than the Imperium- have to homosexual or female priests- a far less monumental issue (please correct me if I'm wrong) than allying with aliens who have been out to kill them for thousands of years. Need I say more?

And as to the waste of good plot and drama. Wouldn't it be fun (I seem to have said this already) to watch the Star Wars guys muscling in for aggressive expansion of the Galactic Empire/ Republic, whilst the Imperium (with or without Primachs) encounters yet another enemy to deal with (and does so with all the appropriately enormous guns and Titans)? And having aliens plotting and scheming, with Orks charging at ranks of Stormtroopers, whilst T'au prepare to stab them in the back, and the Eldar forsee something mysterious about their leader with his hooded face and black cloak? To watch the Stormtroopers struggling to hold back a Necron assault without the benefits of psychics or heavy artillery? To have dramatic duels between an Inquisitor and Darth Vader, or an Imperial Crusade, heavily engaged with Chaos forces (possibly the Sabbat Worlds? Go, Gaunt, go!) attempting to guard their rear against a large foreign army? To have genuine tension in the alliance, with old feuds erupting into violence when the backs of High Command are turned?

I say yes, and that it would be a hell of a lot more in keeping with the canon, and, indeed, human nature. I don't want to reveal too much about War of the Universes (here I go again, blowing my own trumpet), but consider that the Martians are still there, that the T'au have only ever engaged the enemy after human forces had suffered heavy losses, that the Imperium is coming (with familiar faces and big guns) and that Lenin is trying to spark a Russian revolution…

It will be interesting, to say the least.

Forgetting to add more "conventional" ingredients.

Well. We have the Imperial Guardsmen blasting away at the oncoming Wookies with their lasguns, and enormous starships clashing in low orbit, and the Emperor rising (or not) from the golden throne.

What next?

Even by the fairly low standards of our esteemed website, Crossover fics often have a total lack of anything that can be called characterisation, drama, good description, or indeed anything that decent stories use. They just have vast armies and epic events going on in the background, and nothing in the foreground. The characters have nothing to distinguish each other save for their clothes and places of birth. More often than not, they're just all canon characters acting very little like they did in canon; or are essential archetypes (Imperial General, Heroic Space Marine, Hot Eldar Farseer, etc.) Similarly, descriptions boil down to something like this.

Admiral Angelus Imperialis: Wow! That ship is so tiny/huge/unlike our own.

Jedi Master Pretentious: How quaint. They have churches, and all these ancient things that we have forgotten in our modern age. Thank the Force!

Write the damn thing like it's a normal story, but with special subject matter. Use good grammar, dramatic description, human (if not biologically, then in the sense that they are realistic) characters (and have moments not exclusively devoted to action), and strong worldbuilding (if the Imperium is radically changed by the introduction of the Emperor, show how it was before, and afterwards. And show the bad bits too- all the sons and husbands conscripted to fight in the Imperial Guard, the damage from bombs and shells, and so on.)

That way, you won't have me on your back giving you long lists of grammatical errors, poorly chosen words, and so on. This profits everyone, I think.

Keep everything in character

When messing around with as many characters and suchlike as in a crossover, this is vital, too. I may have touched on this issue before at point 1, but I will do so again.

If you're employing canon characters, don't change them. Don't make Marneus Calgar suddenly turn tail and leg it, or Ciaphas Cain actually admit (if you use him, use first person, please) that he acted bravely and selflessly. Don't make the Imperium anything other than dark and oppressive, or the T'au anything other than outwardly good, but ever so slightly hypocritical and corrupt. This applies to all the canon involved. Stick to it, and the story will get that bit more engrossing and interesting.

And finally…

Explain as much as you can

I have used this myself. And it is not good. Having mysterious and coincidental warp rifts taking people to new places, or weird portals taking people back in time reddens and flicks eyes around uncertainly makes people roll their eyes from the word go. Similarly (to use the example of the great Vex Master) dumping loads of different canons into one grand empire to throw at the Imperium (when all of the canons are of the sort that don't look easy to over run themselves- starring in strategy games, for example), and THEN throwing another completely inappropriate canon into a weird role simply makes people lose all suspension of disbelief. And yes, I have reviewed it, but in the sort of way that I may watch _Plan 9 From Outer Space_: sort of to tick of the clichés, and watch loads of things getting shot. I like to think that the character I contributed is going to give it a touch of originality, but maybe that's too much to hope for…

So, there you have it. Crossovers. Not a complete guide, but a number of errors that can be corrected with comparative ease. If you have any other comments, please put them into the review section. It's rare that I get this many reviews one something (apart from crossovers or guides.)

I think that it'll be characterisation next, but if anyone has any preferences, I'll be happy to hear them.


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